At a speech for International Women’s Day, Afghan President Hamid Karzai declared an interview in which President Barack Obama spoke of “opportunities” to reach out to moderate Taliban “good news,” saying this had been the position of the Afghan government for quite some time now. The interview, given on Friday and published this weekend in [...]
Some time on Friday night, Afghan National Policemen opened fire on a joint Afghan-US patrol in the Kapisa Province of Afghanistan. The troops returned fire, killing two of the police in what has been described as a case of mistaken identity. The coalition says the patrol was engaged in operations against Taliban senior leadership when [...]
Speaking at an Israeli cabinet meeting today, Military Intelligence chief Major-General Amos Yadlin declared that Iran “has crossed the technological threshold, so that reaching a military nuclear ability is only a matter of matching the strategy to the goal of creating a nuclear bomb.” The claim comes in spite of comments from US Defense Secretary [...]
The Pakistani military showed off its previously declaring victory in the tiny Bajaur Agency today, showing off a captured (and largely destroyed) marketplace and declaring “the resistance has been broken down,” providing a rare upnote to the military’s ongoing, and largely unsuccessful counter-insurgency campaign along the Afghanistan border. But are their gains in the wake [...]
The US military announced today that 12,000 troops, less than 10 percent of the overall US presence on the ground, will be leaving Iraq in the next 6 months. The announcement that the long-promised pullout will continue at a snail’s pace was further marred, however, by coming on one of the deadliest days in recent [...]
Though they left open the question of presidential orders to detain legal residents by refusing to take up the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, the Supreme Court made a significant statement against such detentions by vacating a split 2008 decision by the Court of Appeals which claimed that the president had been given the [...]
Considering 2008 was the most violent year in Afghanistan since the 2001 American invasion and predictions that 2009 would be even worse, it hardly seems a shock that the winter of 2008-09 has been quite a bit more violent than normal. Yet Colonel Pete Johnson gave reporters an interesting reason for why its been a [...]
Details of a 17-point plan for Swat Valley agreed to earlier this week between Pakistani forces and Sufi Muhammad, head of the Tehreek-e Nafaz-e Shariat-e Mohammad (TNSM) weren’t made immediately available at the time of its signing, but it seems now that it is just the latest move to strengthen the hold of the various [...]
Most of the previous criticism of President Barack Obama’s “pullout” plan from Iraq has centered around it being less a pullout plan than a plan to continue the war indefinitely. But after a week of getting used to the idea that 50,000 troops will remain on the ground and engaging in combat long after the [...]
Ahead of her meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised a rather unique possible solution for the controversial missile defense system in Eastern Europe. Russia, she insisted, might have the opportunity for “joint research, joint development, and even eventually, assuming we can reach such an agreement, joint deployment.” The [...]
